Advertising: Reinventing the American Meal

The trouble with treating food as a commodity is that people can eat only so much. In fact, they are able to consume even less in an industrial society than if they were toting bales of hay. While the American food industry has managed to increase the actual quantity that Americans eat, especially in the later part of the twentieth century, this has not been their primary strategy. The best way of maximizing profits is to take raw food, process it to add “value,” and then resell this new food at a higher price. The less expensive the input, the greater the potential for profit. And with the efficiencies of mass manufacturing bringing processing costs lower and lower, often the single largest component of an item’s price is the marketing.